The present disclosure relates to patient beds and particularly, to patient beds that monitor one or more bed conditions as part of a safety protocol. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to control of how and when the bed conditions are monitored in accordance with the safety protocol.
Patient beds are used in hospitals, nursing homes, and other types of healthcare facilities. Some patient beds send bed status data to a nurse call system. If any of the bed status data is indicative of an undesirable bed condition, an alert is generated by a nurse call computer and displayed on a display screen at a master nurse station. Some nurse call systems also may send a message to a wireless communication device such as a pager or smart phone carried by one or more caregivers assigned to the patient or room from which the alert originated. A dome light outside the patient's room may also be illuminated to indicate the alert condition.
Protocols have been developed for monitoring only a subset of the overall set of bed status conditions for alerting. Thus, for alerting purposes, some bed status conditions may be ignored. In this regard, see U.S. Pat. No. 7,319,386 which shows and describes a nurse call system in which a master nurse station computer is used to set up Care Alert templates in which certain bed status conditions are selected for alert monitoring and some are not. The master nurse station computer receives the incoming bed status data and determines whether to generate an alert which is to be sent to one or more caregivers. Such a system is available commercially from Hill-Rom Company, Inc. as the NAVICARE® Nurse Call (NNC) System.
Some healthcare facilities may not include a nurse call system or may not include a nurse call system that is configured to receive bed status data from patient beds. However, the caregivers at such healthcare facilities may wish to achieve bed status monitoring of only a subset of the overall number of conditions of a patient bed that are available for monitoring. In some instances, different protocols for monitoring respective subsets of bed conditions based on a patient's needs may be desired. Thus, there is a need for patient beds that have the capability for based-based safety protocol control.